Dororon Enma-kun

When I saw the names Go Nagai and Yoshihiro Yonetani together, I figured they'd produce something absolutely batshit.
Was not disappointed.

I'd seen the recent Enma-kun OAV, which was a fairly disastrous attempt to gritty up the property; Yonetani, naturally, embraces Go Nagai's penchant for cringe-worthy humor with such gusto that I found it hard not to laugh, even when the heroine is doing a pee dance, or the old lady at the sento is swinging her tits around. And the monster of the week spawning a giant metal cock for Enma to sword fight is pretty much awesome by any standard.
Objectively, this is not at all a good show, but the unique energies of these two madmen seem to feed off each other fairly well; if the opening above gets you wet, then FUCK, watch it.

We also checked out the first episode of Tiger and Bunny, which was fun; let's hope they don't hit the workaholic dad has no time for his kid cliche too hard, because the corporate sponsored heroes working for points on a reality TV show premise is working for me better than I expected.

Go Nagai x Noboru Iguchi = Terrible in a way I'm finding hard to comprehend

Sukeban Boy is Noboru Iguchi adapting an old Go Nagai manga that'd previously been animated, and actually released here by ADV as Delinquent in Drag. The ADV title sums it up-- it's about a bull-headed fightin' dude who looks like a lady, and ends up being forced to embrace the gender role thrust upon him and transferring to an all-girls' school where he saves time by making his rivals double as his harem. This was made about two years before Machine Girl, and it looks like Iguchi improved an awful lot in the interim. It was also shot in about five days, which explains much but excuses nothing. Let's list this movie's many fatal flaws, any one of which would be crippling, but the congruence of which scuppers the movie entirely.


Fatal flaw number one: Some things that work in comics just don't work in live action. Everyone knows skintight superhero costumes somehow seem unremarkable drawn on the page, but just make you look like Tron Guy in real life. Apparently sleazotron Go Nagai get-ups have the same effect. All through this movie I could totally see how nonsense like loinclothed sanskrit-covered nuns, bottomless football girls, and topless desperadoes could look sort of interesting as an illustration, but dressing actual people like that is even more awkward and off-putting than it sounds. No, even weirder than you're thinking. The bad cosplay kind of weird. No amount of skin can save that.

Which leads us to fatal flaw the second: If you only cast porno actresses in your movie, that means your movie has all the great acting porn is renowned for. While doing Go Nagai full justice requires some fearless ladies, I think he might be better served by making a movie that doesn't pain you every time someone speaks. They do at least cast the cutest girl and best actress as the lead, but in this movie "best actress" means "can actually change her facial expression". Asami kinda stole the show as the thug mechanic in Machine Girl, and her hammy double drag act is the one thing making this watchable at all, but it's definitely not worth suffering through everyone else's performance.


The acting in this movie is actually SO bad it occasionally busts through the fourth wall into something sublime. It's kind of amusing when the lead can't keep herself from cracking a smile during a particularly weak "fight scene", but we reach a certain kind of awesome badness when three of the only four men in the movie get mowed down by bullet-firing cyborg nipples (don't ask), and halfway through they give up on using blood squibs and just have the guys START PLAYFULLY THROWING FAKE BLOOD AT EACH OTHER to symbolically represent their deaths. The obvious fun they're having making the movie finally manages to bleed through and reach the viewer in a way the thing they actually made is totally incapable of, but after that it's back to shitty business as usual.

The third fatal flaw is that this movie is cheap, cheap, cheap. It's almost literally shot in someone's backyard, and I was honestly shocked when I saw someone was credited for the two Casio keyboard loops they dare call background music. My personal hero Yoshihiro Nishimura does provide the occasional special effect, but it's more telling that he also shows up a couple times as an extra, and apparently donated the use of his house to film in.

The US DVD doesn't help matters, with a feisty but sloppy translation that can't even be bothered to get the director's name right. I will give them props for at least attempting to sub the credits, given the depressing number of DVD releases that don't bother at all. They also pull one of my favorite moves, translating dialogue in the trailer differently than in the full movie, and this one is super egregious; the film version is like half transliterated or some shit:


Sukeban Boy is not recommended to anyone, no matter how perverse or masochistic-- any enjoyment that can be derived by spending the hour to watch it is more efficiently gained by the director's own four minute Sukeban Boy WTF Remix, which is on the disc as an extra and I can't quite believe hasn't been dumped to YouTube yet. The commentary track is surprisingly amusing, but I can't imagine anyone besides me hating themselves enough to sit through this more than once.

Today's moment of Zen

It might be hard to believe, but Demon Lord Dante is not a very good show.

Dulalala!! Ep 07

Heiwajima Shizuo versus...the Go Nagai villains!

It's also interesting that they spent this much time setting up Kasuka...obviously, entirely in service to Shizuo backstory, since Kasuka doesn't appear till the fourth novel, which I still don't think we're going to see.

There's a special hell for underachievers

Here in 2009, with the ongoing Animepocalypse in full swing, Bandai Visual/Honneamise's ridiculous business plan seems even sillier than it did at the time. For those of you coming in late, the label started out well, positioning themselves as sort of a Criterion Collection for anime, rereleasing a handful of prestige titles in both no-frills regular discs and lavish, feature-packed special editions for people with arguably more money than sense (er, guilty).

So, promising start, but within months of those initial releases, they started cutting back not just the extras, but on standard features like dual language tracks and per-disc episode counts, and even had the gall to raise prices. Complete fiasco, worked out about as well as you'd think, and the company was dissolved and the more saleable licenses reverted to the more sensible Bandai Entertainment. Incredibly, it looks like the home office in Japan didn't quite learn their lesson, but I'm getting sidetracked.

Anyway, during this second, lesser wave, they released a lot of series that were obscure even at the time, and the laughable prices they were charging made sure they stayed that way. Picking through the wreckage a couple years later, I'm a bit more inclined to take a chance at $5 a disc than $40, and hey, turns out Demon Prince Enma is animated by the usually decent Brains Base and directed by Mamoru Kanbe, who helmed the infamous, hilarious Elfen Lied. I'll gamble a stamp. Well, the thing about gambling is you don't always win; I'd love to say this was some kind of overlooked gem, but frankly it's average at best. I will give points for the terrible pun of naming the decrepit old magic hat "Chapeauji".


OK, so this is a four-episode sequel/updating of an old Go Nagai series no one in America's ever heard of. The cute little demon kids are all grown up and now they're sexay demon hunters, because this is a Go Nagai OVA and that means sleaze, gore, and sleazy gore! Both episodes on the first disc involve sex workers, and if you've ever seen any Go Nagai show that isn't Cutey Honey, you know that most people you see will end up dead. We have all the ingredients for, if not a good show, at least an enjoyably trashy one. And for a while, it's OK, depending on how low you're willing to set your brow, but it can't manage a baseline level of quality for long.

First and foremost, this is not the kind of show you watch for the characters. Impulsive dick Enma, icily irritable Yukihime, and dissolute kappa Kapaeru are incredibly one-note, practically ciphers, which means all the enjoyment comes from watching them do crazy magic stuff, but demon-smacking is at a bare minimum. This is more a horror show than an action one, so the monster of the week has to stumble around offing hapless victims for a bit before our heroes get around to doing their job. There are a couple other recurring characters, including a spunky tabloid journalist and a hard-bitten cop we immediately renamed "Detective Frankenstein", but they don't quite manage to shore up the gaping charisma void left by the leads.



Still, the two episodes on disc 1 are at least watchable, and lay a decent enough foundation that could lead somewhere interesting-- so of course, it completely collapses halfway through episode 3, when the story we've been watching gets literally interrupted by another one of dubious quality, and the ostensible lead characters vanish until the very end. Disc 2 is almost perplexingly bad all the way through, full of awfulness like a mansion rendered almost entirely in GONZO-worthy clumsy CGI, and strange storytelling choices like lingering shots of someone's head bobbing up and down, staring at an eerily dribbling basketball. Even before this dive into ineptitude, the animation quality was basically on a TV level, and almost embarrassing for an OVA. Charging $20 an episode for this is practically a crime, and I feel sorry for anyone who got suckered.

There are a few nice, small moments here and there, for true subculture vultures, but there's a reason no one talks about this one. Much like the company that released it, Demon Prince Enma returns to the hell that spawned it, unmourned, and mostly unknown.

Mainlining awesomeness

Yasuhiro Imagawa, director of Giant Robo, the greatest anime of all time, returns to TV with Shin Mazinger Shogeki! Z-hen on television, his take on Go Nagai's infamously fucked 70s robot show.
From FRAME ONE it is pretty much more incoherent awesomeness than the human mind is capable of processing.

The entire first episode is pretty much one INSANELY bad ass entrance after another, with fucking hundreds of characters and robots and powers and gizmos flung willynilly at the viewer with suitably epic music and accompanying imagery.

A friend called me halfway through and I pretty much just sobbed into the phone, long past the capacity for rational thought. Were I to watch more than one episode of this in a row, I suspect I would lose control of my bladder as well.
Unmissable.